Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Opus 5
Opus 5.5 is the upgrade: Anthropic says it costs about 40% less on typical work and writes its answers more than 30% faster. Opus 5 remains for products tuned on it, and for calls that need thinking switched off.
Choose Claude Opus 5.5 if
- Any new work.
- Lower cost and faster answers.
- Newer knowledge, to June 2026.
Choose Claude Opus 5 if
- A product already tuned and tested on Opus 5.
- Calls that need thinking switched off.
- No time to re-test before a deadline.
Side by side
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Claude Opus 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Released | September 2026 | July 2026 |
| Input price, per 1M tokens | $4.60 | $5.75 |
| Output price, per 1M tokens | $23.00 | $28.75 |
| Cached input, per 1M tokens | $0.23 | $0.575 |
| Batch (about half price) | Yes | Yes |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Longest answer | 128K tokens | 128K tokens |
| Reads | Text, Images, PDFs | Text, Images, PDFs |
| Thinks before answering | Always on | Yes, adjustable |
| Open weights | No | No |
| Runs in Sri Lanka | No | No |
Prices are Roar AI’s published rates, live from our price list. Specs are each lab’s own published figures.
What a real job costs
Take 1,000 requests, each about 3,000 tokens in and 1,000 out — a long prompt and a page of answer.
Claude Opus 5.5 does the same job for 1.3× less. Models that think before answering spend extra output tokens doing it, so on hard prompts the real gap can be wider than the rates suggest.
Use both, switch any time
On Roar AI both are on the same key and the same monthly invoice. Trying the other one is a one-word change:
client.chat.completions.create(model="claude-opus-5-5", …) client.chat.completions.create(model="claude-opus-5", …)
Send the same prompts to both for a day and compare the answers on your own work — that settles it faster than any benchmark. Read the docs.